Yankees tickets spike as Jeter nears 3,000th hit

Fan demand rising as popular shortstop closes in on milestone

SamMamudi

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — New York Yankees tickets, suffering something of a slump this year, are seeing an enormous boost in demand as fan favorite Derek Jeter nears his 3,000th hit.

Call it the Jeter premium.

With Jeter, a career Yankee who debuted in 1995, just three hits shy of the mark, tickets for this weekend’s games that just last week were close to $80 on the secondary market were averaging $172 apiece Thursday.

Reuters

New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter at bat.

Jeter’s single hit in Wednesday‘s game in Cleveland further fueled demand for the weekend series. The average weekend price was $158 before that game, according to FanSnap, a ticket comparison service that canvasses more than 50 ticket sites and powers Microsoft’s Bing Events site.

Judging by asking prices for the weekend series at Yankee Stadium, against the Tampa Bay Rays, fans expect the milestone to be hit Friday or Saturday — tickets for Thursday’s game are $119 on average, while average prices for Friday’s and Saturday's games hover at about $200 each. Prices for Sunday’s game stand at an average of $154.

By contrast, seats for the Rays’ mid-August visit, with no milestones expected, are averaging $68 each. Typical Yankees home games see more than 20,000 ticket listings across the online secondary market, said Christian Anderson, director at FanSnap. None of this weekend’s games have more than 6,000 tickets listed. Read about the Yankees’ and baseball’s attendance woes.

“The demand is consistent with what New Yorkers do when there’s a big event coming up,” said Anderson. “We see more pronounced and more sudden price rises for Yankees events than for any other team.”

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When owner George Steinbrenner died in July 2010, average ticket prices more than doubled for the following home game, according to FanSnap, as fans anticipated a special event at the stadium. And the last time a Yankees player was chasing history — third baseman Alex Rodriguez’s quest for his 600th home run — prices also spiked, albeit more selectively. In that case, the biggest rises were in sections where fans could hope to catch the landmark home-run ball, with prices ranging from $27 to $208.

Anderson attributed the sharp rises in part to the fact that the secondary ticket market in New York is “more mature” than in other parts of the country — New Yorkers know where to find tickets and are used to buying them from third parties.

There’s also the size of the media market. The Yankees play in the country’s largest market and are covered almost endlessly by several daily newspapers. National sports-news outlets ESPN, a division of Walt Disney Co.
DIS, +1.78%
and the Time Warner Inc.
TWX, +0.22%
publication Sports Illustrated arguably devote more time to the Bronx outfit than to any other team. The 37-year-old Jeter’s push toward hit No. 3,000 would be unlikely to garner the same attention if he’d spent his career with the Pittsburgh Pirates.

For fans of other teams already weary of hearing about Jeter’s forthcoming achievement, there may be no respite from such Yankees-centric celebrations.

The 35-year-old Rodriguez, who joined the team in 2005 after hitches with the Seattle Mariners and Texas Rangers, has six years left on his contract after this season, and it’s likely he’ll eventually reach his 3,000th hit, 700th home run, 2,000th run batted in and, perhaps, his 763rd home run — claiming one of sport’s most fabled records from Barry Bonds — all in Yankee pinstripes.

The best remedy for those fans may well be to sign up for Yankees season tickets — and make money each time the hype machine kicks into gear.

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